Sasquatch and Scientists: Reporting Scientific Anomalies
© Dr. Ron Westrum, Ph.D., Sociology Department,
Eastern
This article
explores the dilemma which confronts the observer of an apparent scientific
anomaly: should he report the phenomenon and face possible ridicule or should
he refrain from reporting and so question the reliability of his own mind or
senses? The author examines how the response of the public and the media to
observations or obvious hoaxes, which resemble the observer's experience, may
either inhibit or encourage reporting. He concludes by drawing a parallel
between public and scientific attitudes toward Sasquatch and U.F.O. phenomena
and the reluctance of established science and popular wisdom in late eighteenth-
century
In pondering the meaning of Sasquatch reports and trying to determine the
reality of the creatures they describe, we must consider the manner in which
these reports reach us. In a series of papers (1) I have presented data about
the "social intelligence system" which transmits reports of anomaly
experiences from those who have the experiences to the rest of society. What I
would like to do here is to suggest some of the implications of this work for
the reporting of Sasquatch sightings. Unfortunately, I have not been able
to do a special study of Sasquatch reporting, although I have read much of the
literature. Hence, my remarks are necessarily somewhat impressionistic. I hope,
nonetheless, that they will help clarify some of the issues involved in
considerations of the reality of Sasquatch.
"Anomaly"
is used here in a very special sense to describe events that are
"impossible" in the cultural framework of the person who experiences
them. An anomaly is an event that is not supposed to happen. Accordingly, the
person who experiences such an event is likely to see it as problematical. He may actually have difficulty recognizing
its anomalous character in the first place.
Even when he does recognize it as an anomaly, he may try to check his
own perceptions in various ways.
The event can fall into one of three categories. It may be a rare event, which
is known to science, an event, which is unknown to science but conforms to
current scientific theory, or an event which is unknown to science and which
does not conform to current scientific theory. Events of the first type are to
be considered anomalies only because the witness does not believe they are
scientifically acceptable; however, the phenomenology of these sightings should
be the same as the other two types, and therefore they can serve as a useful
control group. Some examples of the first type would e meteorite (2) and ball
lightning (3) sightings by persons who did not realize that these events are
known to science.
Anomalies of the second type might include Sasquatch, sea serpents, and in fact
the whole area that Bernard Heuvelmans has referred to as "Cryptozoology." (4) While it is
conceivable that there could be other "crypto sciences," as Marcello Truzzi (5) has called them, most anomaly reports which
involve unknown but scientifically acceptable events are biological in nature.
Sea
serpents, for instance, are in no sense biologically impossible. Indeed, quite
formidable sea serpents, such as mosasaurs, have existed at earlier points in
the Earth's history. On the other hand, non-biological anomalies usually
involve the violation of one tenet or another of scientific theory.
Truzzi has referred to claims of the third type as
"parascientific," since they go beyond current scientific theory.
Some physicists would consider ball lightning parascientific, for there is no
adequate theory to explain its occurrence.
(6)
All
three of these types, however, are likely to evoke similar reactions on the
part of a person who confronts anomaly experiences together is that they are
socially unacceptable, and this means that the person who has such an
experience must face a dilemma: should he report the experience or not? Let us
explore this problem a little further.
THE REPORTING DILEMMA
The person who has
had an anomaly experience is likely to experience a certain amount of
"cognitive dissonance": a lack of agreement between his beliefs and
his experience.(7) The more impressive the experience, the more difficult this
problem is likely to be. Many witnesses will resolve the problem in their own
minds by denying the experience or rationalizing it away or by changing their
beliefs about the event in question. It is likely, however, that they will
consult others about the meaning of the experience, either for advice or to
convince them of its reality.
Usually
these will be the person's family, friends, or work associates; how these
persons react may determine whether any formal attempt at reporting is made.
Often, we know, the person's family or friends will not believe him, especially
if he was the sole witness. (8) But in any case the witness is often left with
the same problem: was the experience real? If it was, then what was the nature
of the event experienced?
To get this resolution, however, the person is likely to have to make a public
report. Generally, the person's primary group will not have the necessary
information, so he must go to the authorities or to scientific
"experts." Or, he may report what he has seen to the press, in an effort to convince others of its reality
(although more often the press will approach the sighter).
But
by making a report the person exposes himself to ridicule. This may come in the
form of condescension or laughter on the part of the person or persons to whom
the report is made, or it may come in the much more damaging form of satire in
the press. Captain George Drevar, from whose ship,
the 'Pauline', a sea-serpent was sighted in 1875, complained that:
"It is easy for such a paper to make any man, good, great, or interesting,
look ridiculous. Little wonder is it that my relatives write saying that they
would have seen a hundred sea-serpents and never reported it; and a lady also
wrote that she pities anyone related to anyone that had seen the
sea-serpent" (9) Reporting may also be inspired by a sense of civic duty.
In the case of U.F.O. reporters, for instance, this is claimed to be the major
motivation in forty-three per cent of the cases. (10) From the manner in which
the report is often treated, however, one might well infer that the
person's civic duty is to keep quiet. Certainly, one of the main reasons that
eighty-seven per cent of U.F.O. sighters never tell anyone other than family or
friends about their sighting is the fear of this kind of treatment. (11) And
furthermore, how can the person be sure that what he saw was really something
anomalous and not something normal that
"just looked funny"? The concern about being unable to discriminate
the anomalous from the normal was found to be the major reason for
non-reporting in U.F.O. cases. (12) One thing is certain: the reporter is very
unlikely to be rewarded for making the report, except in the achievement of
notoriety. Hence, the person who has an anomaly sighting i
rewarded for keeping quiet and acting as a buffer for the rest or society from
reports of anomalous events.
Unfortunately,
this may mean that the sighter is unable to "square" his experience;
he does not know whether he saw a genuine anomaly, an optical illusion, an hallucination, or simply a rare phenomenon. On the
other hand, persons who see the Loch Ness monster, a U.F.O., or a Sasquatch are
lucky: the anomalies they have experienced are well known, they are labeled,
and even though the person who sees one has had a deviant experience, at least
it is a deviant experience which others have had. I have often wondered about
persons, on the other hand, who have anomaly experiences, which they, at least,
believe to be unique. In one case, for instance, after I had given a talk on
U.F.O.'s to a small group, a person brought forward an experience that he had
related to very few persons: he had seen a luminous globe roll into and out of
a room. Many readers will recognize this immediately as an instance of ball
lightning, but the person who had had the sighting had felt very uncomfortable
about it, since he did not know he had experienced a recognized (if somewhat
controversial) natural phenomenon.
The appearance of reports of anomalies in the press which are similar to the
anomaly one has experienced are thus reassuring; they help convince one of the
reality and validity of one's own experience. I was pleased one day to get a
call from a woman whose distress I had indirectly alleviated by talking about
U.F.O.'s. The woman, who was a cook at a nearby airport, had had the misfortune
of having a U.F.O. experience on the Fourth of July. For this she had received
a merciless ribbing from her friends. When an article about my U.F.O. research
appeared in the press, her friends began to feel that perhaps she was not so
crazy after all. Finding out that other persons are having the same experience
can thus be very important for one's sense of self-esteem and for the esteem of
one's friends. The reports of others are also likely to make a witness
more willing to report. In what I have called the "report release
phenomenon,"(13) old sightings are often reported after considerable
publicity is given to a phenomenon in magazines or the press. Some believe that
the "me too" character of this stimulated reporting is evidence of
its fraudulence, (14) but I am certain that in some cases, as with the ball
lightning sighting mentioned earlier, there is a sense of relief in being able
to make one's experience public.
There
is also, I suspect, a feeling that reporting the experience is worthwhile, that
someone is interested in it who can evaluate it properly. In fact, the
recipient of the released experiences is frequently the author of the article
or the expert interviewed by the press. The appearance of a number of
reports in the press is almost certain to awaken another reaction: the desire
to demonstrate the gullibility of the public. For this reason and because of
the desire for notoriety (particularly on the part of teenagers), a number of
hoaxes are likely to be mounted. These take essentially three forms: false
witness that an anomaly has been observed; fabricated evidence (such as
photographs or physical traces); and the construction of stimuli which will
make others believe that they are witnessing an anomalous event. For instance,
in regard to Sasquatch reports, we find persons making up stories that they have
seen "Bigfoot," making false tracks, and occasionally running around
in costumes that will fool a casual observer. Doubtless a study of the persons
who thus fabricate anomalous events would be interesting from a variety of
perspectives. However, since we do not have such a study, we can only examine
the consequences of such hoaxing. In the first place, it is evident that many
hoaxes are likely to be exposed. Some, in fact, are revealed by their
perpetrators, since this is an integral part of their demonstration of the
gullibility of the public. In other cases the internal evidence of the case
contains a subtle contradiction which, when revealed, displays the humorous
nature of the report. One way or another a good many,
perhaps the majority, of fraudulent cases are exposed. The effect of this
exposure on the way in which the public and the scientific community regard
reports of anomalous events is almost necessarily negative. Anomalous reports
by their very nature are difficult to believe in any case. The existence of
fraudulent reports seems to suggest a ready explanation that is appealing to
scientists, newspaper reporters, and professional skeptics: all anomalous
reports are frauds. The effect on reporting is correspondingly negative.
Few people enjoy being laughed at. The person who is willing to report an
anomaly when several fraudulent reports have recently been exposed is hardy
indeed. Many persons who would be willing to make a detailed report if they
could find someone sympathetic to report to are discouraged by initial negative
receptions created by this atmosphere. The fraudulent report is thus likely to
constrict the reporting process.
PERCEPTUAL CONTAGION
Another source of
difficulty is the low-threshold anomaly experience. I use the term "low-threshold"
to refer to those anomaly experiences in which there is a mental set in favor
of perceiving the anomaly. With a low threshold of perception, perceptual
mistakes are easily made, and it is all too easy to have a Sasquatch
"sighting" which will not hold up under analysis. (15) I have
personally interviewed persons who have had low-threshold sightings of
U.F.O.'s; in these cases the effect of suggestion and preconception on their
experiences is obvious to the experienced interviewer.
The difficulty with such sightings is the spread of folklore, which describes
the parameters of the Sasquatch experience. The person learns, in advance of
the experience itself, what kinds of perceptual cues can be used to identify a
Sasquatch. He may then require, from a perceptual standpoint, an absolute
minimum of stimuli to feel that he has had a Sasquatch experience. But folklore
about anomalies follows directly on the heels of publicity.
In
addition to information contained in newspaper articles, there are more
sensational stories in 'True', 'Argosy', 'Saga', and similar magazines. This is
further supplemented by "documentary" or dramatized film accounts of
real occurrences and by orally transmitted folklore. The latter tends to stress
particularly methods of detection and protection against dangers associated
with Sasquatch sightings. It is improvised news (16) to fill the specific need
of dealing with an uncertain and possibly dangerous situation.
This folklore tends to lower the usefulness of the average sighting, since it
makes people more willing to perceive something when nothing is there and
incidentally makes them more vulnerable to hoaxes of the second and third
kinds. It does a great deal to confuse the question of the anomaly's existence.
REACTIONS OF THE MEDIA
Until a sighter has
actually tried to make a report, his perception of the reaction that a report
will produce is determined in a large part by what he reads and sees in the
media. As we have seen, if news stories present other reporters as fools, he
may be very reluctant to report. If the story is presented in a neutral or
sympathetic fashion, on the other hand, this may encourage the person to report
the sighting. The media controls, to a larger extent than it realizes,
the number of reports made public. The mere fact of publicizing anomaly
sightings at all, in fact, is likely to stimulate reporting, since it
demonstrates to sighters that other persons are having the same experiences.
The presentation in the media of opinions by scientific experts plays a lesser,
but still important, role. Scientists can usually be counted upon to reject
anomaly reports, but this reaction is recognized and discounted by many people.
(The situation is quite different when direct contact with a scientist is involved.)
The more important effect of scientific opinion concerns the reaction of the
press: the reporter looks to the opinions of the scientific community as a
guide for his own treatment of reports of anomalies. Press interviews with
scientists are as much for the benefit of the press as they are for the
information of media consumers.
Whether or not there is an anomaly sighting "wave," I would like to
suggest, is determined by the press in the same way that it determines
"crime waves." In fact, the press perhaps plays an even larger role
in anomaly reporting, since it can affect the reporting of anomalies to the
authorities in the first place, whereas in crime reporting the control of the
press is essentially limited to publicizing events that have already been
reported to the police. The press are often viewed as
stimulating anomaly reports because of the large demand for them on the part of
their readers. My strong suspicion is, however, that it is the opinion of their own colleagues that is the major determinant of press
behavior. If other newspapers are printing anomaly reports, then they will too.
What is "news," then is as much determined by the behavior of the
other newspapers as it is by consumer demand. What this means is that the
sudden appearance of many publicized reports of Sasquatch or other anomalies
may not be a result of a sudden spate of sightings but rather of the imitative
behavior of the press. At the very least we can note that without a massive
publication of reports the "wave" will not even exist. I think it is
very naive to assume, however, that press coverage of anomaly sightings is only
affected by the rate at which sightings are reported. There are also the
internal determinants of press behavior that I have indicated.
SASQUATCH AND SCIENTISTS
In contemporary
society we have given to scientists an important task which in previous times
was frequently given to the clergy: the management of our "sense of
reality." It is science that decides what is real and what is not, what
exists and what does not exist. To be sure, other institutions compete with
science for this right, but ultimately science is the arbiter. When the reality
of creatures like the Sasquatch is put to the question, science has the final
say. Even Sasquatch advocates who have nothing good to say about science would
be delighted if science would admit these hypothetical creatures to the realm
of legitimately researchable objects. Perhaps, therefore, we ought
to consider for a minute just how science might go about making such an
admission. To do so I am going to call to my aid a little bit of history and
discuss the meteorite controversy of the late eighteenth century. (17)
At
that time it was fashionable for savants to poke fun at the "absurd"
belief that stones could fail from the air. After such a fall of stones at
Julliac in
The first element was the discovery that the stones alleged to be aerolites
were similar in composition to each other and different in composition from
terrestrial rocks. This was not so much a matter of what was in them, but
rather how it was put together. For instance, the meteorites with a
considerable amount of iron had nickel in them, a combination which had not
been found in terrestrial rocks. Similarly, all the stone meteorites had black
crusts and a granular interior: if they did not have a common origin, why did
they look so similar? However, these common elements were discovered only through
research: some scientists had to take the meteorites seriously enough to detect
these similarities. The second element was a theory about where the rocks
came from. Scientists were more willing to consider reports of falling rocks
when some of their number proposed that meteorites might be thrown out from
volcanoes on the moon. Now it turned out that this theory was erroneous, but
the important thing was that there was a theory. Established science maintained that unless
there was a theory to explain the origin of the meteorites, they could not be
considered as a special phenomenon. Of
course, we have all been taught in school that theories are proved by
experiment, not the other way around, but actually, in this case, it was the
existence of the theory, which helped the experiment (perhaps we should say the
experience) to gain acceptance.
The
third element was as sighting which could not be ignored. Exactly why this sighting, which took place
near a French village called L’Aigle in 1803, could not
be ignored is a complex matter. Partly,
it was because the question of meteorites was very controversial at the time,
even to the point of becoming the subject of popular songs. Partly, it was because the village was only
about seventy miles from
If
we consider the Sasquatch, it is evident that not all of these conditions are
fulfilled. For instance, while the overall biological characteristics of the
Sasquatch are well known to those who have studied the reports, there is no
theory linking the occurrence of such large hominid creatures with the rest of
evolutionary theory, at least not to my knowledge. Then, there is the problem
of why, if they do exist, we do not have a carcass. The third element, the
sighting, which cannot be ignored, is also clearly not present, no matter how
credible the Patterson film may be to Sasquatch advocates.
The meteorite phenomenon passed through three stages: a stage of uncorrelated
observations, a stage of intense controversy, and finally the stage of
scientific acceptance. Thanks to the efforts of Ivan Sanderson, John Green, and
others, Sasquatch reports are no longer uncorrelated observations. They have
passed to the stage of controversy.
When they will finally reach scientific acceptance depends in part upon the
intellectual inventiveness of Sasquatch advocates in devising a theory. But it
also depends on an observation, which cannot be ignored; in other words, it
also depends upon a lucky break.
Notes
1."Social
Intelligence About Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites," Social Studies of
Science 8 (1978):
461-93;
"Social Intelligence About Anomalies: the Case of
UFO's," Social Studies of Science 7, no. 3
(1977): 271-302;
"Knowledge About
Sea-Serpents,"
Sociological Review Monographs 27,
"On the Margins of Science" (1979), edited by Poy Wallis, pp. 293-314.
2. See H. H. Nininger, 'Find A Falling Star' (New York: Paul Eriksson,
1972), p. 30.
3.
4. See for instance, Bernard Heuvelmans 'On the Track of Unknonwn Animals' (New York: Hilland Wang,
1959).
5. "Editorial," Zetetic 1, no. 2 (1977): p. 3-8.
6. See Eugene Garfield,"When
Citation Analysis Strikes Ball Lightning," Current Contents 8, no. 20 (1976): 5-16.
7. Leon Festinger,
'A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957).
8. See John Fuller, 'Incident at Exeter' (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1966), pp. 131 54,
140, 176.
9. Quoted in Bernard Heuvelmans, 'In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents' (New York: Hill and Wang,
1968), p. 225.
10. Aldora Lee, "Public Attitudes toward
UFO Phenomena,"
in University of Colorado, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying
Objects (New York:
Bantam Books, 1968), p. 227.
11. Ibid., p.
226.
12. Ibid.
13. See Westrum, "Social
Intelligence About Anomalies: The Case of UFO's," p. 285.
14. Urner Liddel, "Phantasmagoria
or Unusual Observations in the Atmosphere," Journal of the Optical Society of
America 43 no. 4
(1953): 314-17;
Herbert
Hackett, "The Flying Saucer: A Manufactured Concept,"
Sociology and Social Research, 32 (May/June 1948): 869-73.
15. For a discussion of "low-threshold" sightings and their
characteristics, see my article on "Witnesses of UFO's and Other
Anomalies," in
Richard Haines, editor, UFOS and the Behavioral Scientist (Metuchen, N.J.: Shoestring
Press, 1979).
16. Tamotsu Shibutani, 'Improvised News: A
Sociological Study of Rumor' (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
17. For further details, see my "Science and Social Intelligence
about Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites," Social Studies of Science 8, no. 4 (November 1978).
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Source:
The original Westrum paper was on microfiche
at the library in San Francisco and sent to